Reputation & Trust Signals
Ecosystem and roadmap concepts for deriving trust signals from audit logs and agent activity — not part of the ratified KYA-OS v1 protocol
Reputation & Trust Signals
Non-normative: ecosystem and roadmap concepts
Reputation and trust scoring is not part of the ratified KYA-OS v1 protocol. No conformance level requires it, no protocol message carries a score, and no scoring engine is a protocol component. What v1 does define is the scope rule for any reputation an ecosystem builds on top (SPEC.md §11.12): reputation attaches primarily to the Responsible Party at the root of a delegation chain, so bad actors cannot shed history by spawning fresh agents and new agents under a trusted party are not penalized for lacking their own. Everything below describes ecosystem and roadmap concepts, not protocol requirements.
Why Reputation Matters
In autonomous systems, the identity of an agent isn't enough. Reputation allows services to assess how trustworthy an agent is, based on its behavior over time.
Overview
Registry and verifier services MAY derive trust signals from protocol artifacts they already verify:
- Audit events emitted by agents or services
- Delegation chain evaluation outcomes
- Revocation history
- Conformance evidence (recomputed, never self-claimed)
This allows a verifier or relying party to adapt access controls, rate limits, or challenge levels dynamically. Two protocol facts constrain any such system:
- Reputation is advisory, never the gate. The cryptographic delegation check is the load-bearing decision; registry standing is a secondary signal. Services should honor well-formed delegations from low-standing delegates — applying rate limits or scope reduction if needed — because outright rejection pushes the same authority through worse, less auditable channels.
- Scores attach to the Responsible Party. Agent-level reputation, where surfaced, is a secondary signal scoped to a specific binding, not a free-floating per-agent score (SPEC.md §11.12).
Scoring Models
Ecosystem scoring systems typically weigh factors such as:
- Recomputed conformance evidence
- Age and history of the Responsible Party
- Number and outcomes of past interactions
- Independent attestations
Models range from boolean allowlists to continuous trust scores; the protocol takes no position on the model.
Provenance Requirements
Any trust signal is only as good as its provenance. Signals derived from KYA-OS deployments should be:
- Derived outside the audit ledger — reputation is a projection over audit data, never a record inside it
- Traceable — each signal cites the audit events or verification outcomes it derives from
- Recomputable — a relying party can re-derive the signal from the cited evidence
Source layers:
- Audit Layer — signed, tamper-evident event records
- Delegation Validation — chain verification outcomes
- Credential Revocation — revocation history
Derived scores can be stored locally, synced to an external registry, or surfaced as advisory metadata — but never carried as an authorization input in protocol messages.
External Registries
Registry operators MAY offer trust-signal services — agent lookup by DID, federation-safe trust flagging, or shared deny/allow lists — and deployments MAY sync derived signals to such a registry service. No external registry is part of the KYA-OS specification, and none is required for any conformance level.
Next Steps
→ Learn how audit logs are generated in Audit Layer → See how the audit layer keeps reputation outside the ledger in Reputation Management